Interpretation Board
2020–2021
The Interpretation Board Project was a year-long public art initiative that I led from May 2020–April 2021. This socially-engaged art project activated a public park in the City of Pasadena (Los Angeles County). For this co-created body of work, I invited 10 artist-collaborators to imagine what visual, textual, and tactile “information” should be presented by the park’s interpretation board. They were encouraged to approach the project from a variety of formal, aesthetic, and conceptual perspectives. The art installations responded to the unique parameters of the site and addressed themes relevant to the local community and beyond, touching on a broad range of subject matter including geography and borders, land use, environmental sustainability, identity politics, the immigrant experience, and more.
The Interpretation Board Project transformed the public park into an active site for collective storytelling and meaning-making, with each artist-collaborator contributing to the overall narrative. The on-site installations were accompanied by artist talks, public tours, a film screening, and a panel discussion.
Artist-Collaborators
Jen Bloomer – activist-art
Kerstin Bruchhäuser – interdisciplinary
Carlos Rene Castro – photography
Cameron Harris – film
Vincent Hernandez & Clay Hillenburg – interdisciplinary/sound
Margeaux Walter – photography
Eileen Wold – painting & installation
Shan Wu & Drew Cavicchi – interdisciplinary
Artist Bios
Vincent Hernandez was born in Los Angeles, California and raised in Van Nuys. A first generation Venezuelan-American, he spent much of his childhood and adolescence playing soccer, making art, skateboarding, and taking pictures. These days Hernandez is finishing up his final year at the California Institute of the Arts, trying to read more, going on bike rides, making pizzas, taking night walks, making art, and playing soccer.
Clay Hillenburg was born in Los Angeles, California and spent his formative years in the Pasadena area. Hillenburg is entering his final semester at Bard College studying music, expecting to get his BA this spring. Although music has been his biggest interest, Clay tends to show deep interest in multidisciplinary artistic endeavors. Clay’s favorite things to do other than constantly making music are surfing, eating, and conversing.
Artist Statement
A Locus Amoenus (Latin for “pleasant place”) is a literary term used to set the description of an idyllic landscape, typically containing trees and shade, a grassy meadow, running water, song-birds, and cool breezes. A locus amoenus may appear clear to some by way of its defining qualities, but other times sites of potential pleasure slip discreetly under the radar of the everyday. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Orpheus arrives at a landscape that he finds unfit for the production of poetry. Through the production of a song he brings to the landscape grass, trees, and shade, creating a locus amoenus for himself. Guests are invited to take a step away from their day to decompress, sing a song, find pleasure in anyway, and through the existing elements and their own imagination, experience a locus amoenus for themselves.
The two works at The Interpretation Board Project, Locus Amoenus and 34.168753, -118.146459, ground themselves in the entanglement and division of the site’s natural qualities and the area that surround it. The former, a lenticular print by Hernandez, uses visual illusion to reveal and hide the colorfully formed term “locus amoenus.” The latter, a sound convolution, uses field recordings made by Hillenburg and Hernandez at the site and the surrounding block convolved with digitally synthesized sounds made by Hillenburg.
installed March 13, 2021
Vincent Hernandez & Clay Hillenburg
Los Angeles, CA
Locus Amoenus / 34.168753, -118.146459
2021
lenticular illustration / sound convolution
Artist Bio
Eileen Wold received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and her BA in Studio Art from Loyola University Maryland. She studied painting at the Art Academy of Leuven, Belgium and has taught university studio art and critical theory courses for over 10 years. Wold was born and raised in New York and currently resides on Bainbridge Island outside of Seattle.
Wold has exhibited and lectured at galleries, universities and museums across the country and was featured on PBS Arts Beat for her Empty Waters project exploring the health of the Chesapeake Bay. She was a teaching artist-in-residence at The Kreeger Museum in Washington, DC and at the Terrance Cardinal Cooke Center in NYC. Wold is a co-founder of the online artist publication Black Bucket Essays and recently received the Social Conscious Award from Contemporary Art Gallery Online. She was awarded a transformational leader award in 2018 for her community activist work in Baltimore and was recently featured on ecoartspace.org.
Wold uses a method of deep analytical research to understand the complexity of energy systems. She has chartered planes over coal mines, toured power plants, and has worked collaboratively with scientists and engineers to enrich her practice and inquiry. Her innovative approach of using non-traditional art materials as drawing objects, was featured in the Baltimore Museum of Art: Big Table Talk series in 2015.
Artist Statement
”The small white lawn flags that served as a catalyst for this project are traditionally used to mark boundaries for moving land. I found this object of proposed changes to a landscape, the perfect stand-in for a symbol to explore how we use real natural boundaries to create abstract and political ones. The white flag is also often used to represent an effort to surrender. A willingness to accept an undesired fate was also on my mind as we come to terms with the realities of a shifting climate and continue to fight for sustainable systems. Approaching these ideas with a background in landscape painting, I am also interested in how our modern idea of landscape can be preserved or destroyed in the process.”
installed February 12, 2021
Eileen Wold
Bainbridge Island, Washington
Boundaries
2021
acrylic on panel, 97 white lawn flags
Artist Bio
Carlos Rene Castro was born in El Progreso, Yoro Honduras and raised in Salinas, California after migrating to the United States at five years old. Castro is currently a photography student at Glendale Community College. Most of his inspiration comes from his experiences growing up as an undocumented child in the United States. He has won numerous awards including the prestigious Lillian Disney Scholarship and Edward Weston Scholarship. He has shown work in galleries in cities throughout California, including San Francisco, Sacramento, Monterey, and Los Angeles. Castro’s plan for the future is to transfer to a four university and obtain a BFA in Photography so he can teach photography at a public grade school.
Artist Statement
Captured within a mile radius of the Interpretation Board, “Untitled” is representative of a larger photo series, in which Castro documents parks, schools, and recreation centers—spaces that are usually bustling with people and activity but that are now unoccupied due to the ongoing pandemic.
In a socially and economically diverse city like Pasadena, public parks are relied upon as free and accessible places for families and social groups to gather regardless of age and economic status. Parks serve as important hubs for social exchange and community-building, particularly in dense urban areas where private recreational space is scarce. For this project, Castro turns his lens towards these essential spaces—openly sharing the acute sense of loss that he and many others are feeling during these difficult times. Castro emphasizes the inaccessibility of these spaces by focusing his lens on specific elements. A prohibitive chainlink fence. A padlocked gate. A set of swings, utterly still.
In “Untitled”, it’s almost as if we are right there in the space of the photograph. We can feel the cold starkness of the empty bleachers. We can hear the echo of cheers from a bygone game. Without the warmth of animated bodies and smiling faces, the metal structure become a brutalist ruin. Through this photograph and the others in the series, Castro tells an all-too-familiar story. He confronts our collective feelings of isolation, and in doing so, validates our sadness and (perhaps most importantly) encourages us to move beyond it.
“In this series, I pushed myself to incorporate new techniques not often used in my practice. The locations I visited and photographed were spaces where my soul felt free from the troubled world.
Let these photographs take you to that space where you can feel like yourself. Do not let the pandemic limit your space. Create your own nourishing space within yourself.”
–Carlos Rene Castro
installed January 8, 2021
Carlos Rene Castro
Los Angeles & Salinas, California
Untitled
2020
digital photograph, dye-sublimation print on aluminum
Artist Bio
Shan Wu & Drew Cavicchi are an artist duo working in installation, photography, light, and film. Their collaboration is rooted in mutual interests in art and social studies. They apply different technologies and approaches tailored to specific projects. Utilizing site specificity as an integral part of their practice, they investigate time, space, and people’s connection to everyday objects. They are often looking for avenues of the unexpected, provoking a participant to new and perhaps unexplored territories.
As residents of The Residency Project, Shan & Drew have continued to develop Invisible Landscape, a project that collides human made structure with natural structure, exposing the idea of framing and construction within visual culture.
Artist Statement
Interpreting Land is a site-responsive sculpture as part of the Interpretation Board Project organized by The Residency Project. Located in a public micro park in residential Pasadena, the interpretation board is facing a scene with a man-made landscape and fences from private houses. A patch of manicured grass cut to fit - a literal piece of land - lays on the interpretation board.
Interpreting Land is a playful and tactile invitation to the public to question altered landscapes, land ownership, and the connection of humans to constructed nature in urban and suburban environments.
installed November 22, 2020
Shan Wu & Drew Cavicchi
Interpreting Land
2020
Patch of grass on an interpretation board
Artist Bio
Jen Bloomer is an artist, facilitator and the founder of Radici Studios in San Francisco. For the past two decades, she has painted and taught art in Guatemala, India, Italy, Colorado, Eritrea, Thailand, Kenya and California. Jen has a BA in Latin American Studies, a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Painting, and a Masters Degree in Expressive Arts Therapy. She has created art with people aged 1 to 81 giving space for them to find their unique creative voice in the world through the arts. Jen’s own activist art can be seen in local murals, at marches for social justice across the country, and across social media. Her work has been shown internationally by Amplifier Art, and is included in the Library of Congress archive. Jen is a white woman married to an Eritrean/Italian man with whom she is raising mixed race children. She believes that the intersection of creativity, connection and community holds the answer to our personal and collective healing.
Artist Statement
This site-specific work was adapted from a similar drawing previously created by Jen as part of her Art for Change activism poster series. Jen used photographs of the ground around the interpretation board to create the background. “I hope that it will feel like the art and message are emerging out of the ground.”
installed October 1, 2020
Jen Bloomer
San Francisco, California
May We Grow Back…
2020
site-specific photo collage and drawing
Artist Bio
Cameron Harris holds a Master of Fine Arts in Film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has held teaching positions with Hampton University and Richmond Public Schools in Virgina, as well as with Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. He currently teaches Film and Video at the French American International School in San Francisco. Harris has created independent films in Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America.
Artist Statement
I wanted to explore what we go through as a people. I understood what I went through. I started with a small group of friends and interviewed them. And then I started to hear similarities even though they didn’t know each other and I hadn’t put them in one room. From that, I interviewed more people. I went to Germany, Switzerland, France, Singapore, South Africa, Angola, and the Netherlands to build a collective narrative of what we go through as a people and look at colonialism from a global perspective.
I studied German at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I’d been to Germany several times. I’d seen a lot of people that looked like me who would come up to me and speak to me on the street. I knew of a lot of soldiers from WW2 who fought in Germany and decided to stay because if they came back to America they didn’t have any rights. So I wanted to know what their experiences were. And then looking at colonialism in the Netherlands—what the Dutch have done, the Dutch East India Company—so I wanted to interview the Black people there and in South Africa with their history of apartheid. I knew of America and what we went through, and then in Angola, the Portuguese. So from a historical point of view, I wanted to take some of the critical components of history and interview where Black people had been transported through the slave trade.
I think one of the thing that kind of surprised me (from the film’s early screenings and Q&As) is that people don’t know the history. They don’t know the magnitude and the depth of what has happened and the mental impact that enslavement has had on generations of people. If you look at the timeline, slavery ended in 1865, we weren’t really free until 1964, and looking at the timetable, that’s only 51 years of freedom. So if you go back 51 years and then look at 400+ years of enslavement, I don’t thnk people have really gotten over that and a lot of us don’t know our worth on both sides—Black or white.
The entire objective of this film is to have people come together in a loving environment and see the humanity within one another so that we can move forward as a people collectively.
Transcripted from 2017 television interview
of Cameron Harris on Virginia This Morning
installed September 1, 2020
Cameron Harris
Richmond, Virginia
In Our Words
2020
photo collage with QR code link to a 10-minute video excerpt from “In Our Words," a feature-length documentary film that presents a global perspective on the Black Experience and asks: What does it mean to be Black?
Artist Bio
Margeaux Walter was born in Seattle, Washington and currently lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2014 and her BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2006. She has received multiple honors from the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward, HeadOn Photo Festival, Photolucida, Prix de la Photographie Paris, International Photography Awards, and other organizations. She has been awarded artist-in-residence programs at Montalvo Arts Center, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Marble House Project, VCCA, Red Gate Gallery in Beijing and BigCi in Bilpin, Australia (Environmental award). Currently she is the recipient of the Sony Alpha Female Award (2020). She is represented by Winston Wachter Fine Art in NY, and Foto Relevance in Houston, TX, and has participated in dozens of exhibitions at institutions such as MOCA in Los Angeles, CA, Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ, The Center for Photography in Woodstock, NY, Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA, Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa, CA, Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, WA, and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA. Her work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, New York Post, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, and Blouin Art Info.
Artist Statement
Notions of visibility and invisibility thread throughout my work which is largely image-based and centered around consumption, waste, excess and labor. In questioning the allure and consequences of consumption, my work tends to visually reference the language of advertising, with a subverted element that challenges our passive ways of seeing. Images are now consumed rapidly and on a massive scale, similar to products and information (real or fake). Because of this I am in a constant battle with making images that are either visible or visibly invisible. Though seemingly digitally fabricated, my images are created in camera, using Photoshop only to combine the characters.
Greenery is a site specific image created just outside of Pasadena in the landscape. Thinking about a disconnection with our environments in relation to climate change denial, I am constructing site-specific sets that when seen through a camera lens disrupt the landscape much like a glitch in the image. This glitch could be seen as a pixel, a cubicle, or a portal, yet there is a glimpse of human life that is both camouflaged into the land yet completely isolated and disconnected from it. Read on an interpretation board, the human interference into the landscape (glitch) will create a moment of pause as people pass by, allowing them to think about their own interactions and interference in the landscape as they move through it.
installed July 15, 2020
Margeaux Walter
Brooklyn, New York
Greenery
2020
photograph, dye-sublimation print on aluminum
margeauxwalter.com
instagram.com/margeauxwalter
Artist Bio
Kerstin Bruchhäuser works in textiles, paper and found objects. She finds and collects materials wherever she goes and these provide her with inspiration.
Bruchhäuser's current work is including a variety of ongoing series of sewn portraits, paper collages and pojagis.
Inspired by snapshots in time of everyday life routines she stages the border between the personal-private and the public. Bruchhäuser addresses different aspects of time. In her artworks she often isolates one second and transfers it into the material for the moment to remain.
Bruchhäusers holds a Ph.D. degree in Art and Design from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She lives and works in Hamburg, Germany.
Artist Statement
Working with used materials is fundamental to my artistic practice. I work with old-fashioned and almost out-of-date objects like antique pieces of dowry or old paper maps.
Both, textiles and paper, are convincing by their tactility and suppleness. Bygone times have left their traces on these materials and their willingness to be transformed makes them a perfect medium for exploring that and how things change.
Taken out of their former context – they are here now, for you. My artworks are meant to evoke a personal response by reflecting the past and to give inspiration to move forward with hope and determination.
installed May 23, 2020
Kerstin Bruchhäuser
Hamburg, Germany
Something That Was Never Really There
2020
ink on paper
kerstinbruchhaeuser.com
instagram.com/kerstin.bruchhaeuser
